Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt

"This is a wonderful book, full of illustrations. It’s laid out almost like an art book. It is, I think, the best of a number of books that are available to introduce readers to hieroglyphics in a serious way. Betrò doesn’t say much about the grammar or syntax but you can get that elsewhere. What she does do is offer a nice selection of signs from Gardiner’s Sign List, and groups them according to sensible categories. So all the signs for plants are in one place, all the signs for the gods are in another place. Each sign occupies a full page, and the page is laid out in such a way that you can immediately understand the sign’s phonetic value, its function, whether it’s a determinative or not, whether it has a Demotic or hieratical equivalent, and so on. She also discusses the meaning of the sign in its relation to Egyptian religion. So you really get a sense of the role that each sign plays within this theological system. To read this book from start to finish opens a wide window into the culture. The same themes come up over and over: the afterlife and what happens there, who controls what, as well as a view of ordinary life in ancient Egypt—the kinds of plants and animals that are around, the kinds of instruments people are using to get on with their day-to day-lives, and what sacred significance those things had too. It’s a really nice encapsulation of ancient Egypt through its writing system. You can see a lot of things just by looking at the script. It’s a list created by Alan Gardiner (1879-1963), a British Egyptologist. He collected all of the hieroglyphic signs he could, about 700 signs, and grouped them. His list is what Egyptologists still use to learn hieroglyphics today. It’s available on the internet, but it’s hard to know what to do with it. Betrò’s book makes it accessible to non-specialists. According to Susan Brind Morrow—whose work we’re going to talk about—hieroglyphs are actually easy to learn. The syntax is fairly simple and the signs themselves are evocative. On her view, it’s not that hard to learn the language if you understand the culture to begin with. Certain facts about Egyptian life can help make sense of the hieroglyphs. For instance, there is a hieroglyph that looks like a snake with horns. This is a horned viper, which is not at all uncommon in Egypt even now, and it makes a sound like ‘fffffih’ when you annoy it. Susan Brind Morrow once explained to me that the wonderful thing about this sign is that ‘fffffih’ is its phonetic value, and that’s exactly the noise the horned viper makes when it’s about to strike. “Names had real power in ancient Egypt” At that same meeting, Brind Morrow pointed out a number of other correspondences that were similar. I don’t remember them all, but I would hope that she’s right. The story of the horned viper is such a wonderful just-so story. I want it to be true. But my concern in writing The Riddle of the Rosetta was not to gain a comprehensive knowledge of hieroglyphics but just to be able to read whatever Champollion and Young were able to read, which was a challenge enough in itself. No, not reliably. I could sound something out. I can certainly write my own name in hieroglyphs. I can transliterate things. But the inscriptions themselves are so historically specific, I don’t even think I want to imagine that I could reliably say what they said."